1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to the area of image displays and more particularly related to solutions to automatic labeling in an electronic image that may be captured off a display being displayed on a display screen or imported from another application.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many applications that require representation or images of displays displayed on a screen such as a computer monitor and uses of these images for non-display purposes. For example, in preparing a manual for a software product, images of various displays resulting from execution of the software are more illustrative than a lengthy description by words. With the popularity of the world wide web (www), there are more applications that require images of displays originated from network resources retrieved from the Internet.
For example, one of such applications is for preparing a patent application depending on screen snapshots for explaining various embodiments. A typical procedure involves capturing a snapshot (image) of what is being displayed on a screen for an embodiment, such image is then imported to an application (e.g., MS Powerpoint) in which essential elements to be described or claimed are labeled with reference numbers (i.e., labels). In many cases, a tracing or indication curve from an identified element to a reference number is provided to avoid obscuring other elements. FIG. 1 shows an example screen snapshot of FIG. 5D from U.S. Pat. No. 6,616,702 in which like numerals refer to like parts. A screen image is captured and reference numbers are added in to reference objects in the captured image to facilitate description of these objects or elements in the screen image. In other cases, a text box is provided to reference an object, where detailed annotations can be provided to explain the indicated object. Such use of a captured image is referred to herein as image illustration or annotation.
It is well known that many of such image annotations are done manually. When there is a change to one of the labels, such as deletion of a label or alignment of the labels, repeated efforts or tedious modification are required. Thus there is a great need for efficient solutions for automatic labeling for image annotation, changes or modification of a labeled image may be performed effortlessly.